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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015
"Ass kickers ... Ass kickers ..."
••
two sons for founding members of Al
Qaeda---was arrested for trying to sell a
Kalashnikov online. Belkacem held a
press conference that was covered by an
evening-news show. Dimitri was watch-
ing television at home that evening when
he spotted Jejoen next to Belkacem on
the screen. Dimitri told the police that
Jejoen was a minor, and asked them to
extract him from the group, but he says
that a judge told him that there was noth-
ing they could do.
Then, one evening in February, 2012,
the principal of Jejoen's high school
warned the police that Jejoen had threat-
ened to "purge" the school. A juvenile
court ordered Jejoen to see a counsellor,
but, according to Dimitri, she didn't know
anything about Islam. "How you can solve
a problem if the other parts don't even
know where is Mecca?" he said. Dimitri
started visiting the Sharia4Belgium head-
quarters, hoping to find evidence of ille-
gal activity. "I always had a feeling that
something is going wrong inside that
clubhouse," he told me. Dimitri and Rose
invited Belkacem to their house, but he
was adept at deflecting their inquiries,
and Dimitri never saw any extremist ma-
terials inside the headquarters. Though
police raids later discovered fundamen-
talist literature---including a pamphlet
with instructions on how to beat women
"with a corrective and educational in-
tent"---it was kept in members' homes,
not at the Sharia4Belgium headquarters.
As part of the indoctrination pro-
gram, the brothers often watched ar-
chived lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki, the
American-born imam who was killed in
a U.S. drone strike in Yemen a little more
than a month before Jejoen's first visit to
Sharia4Belgium.They also watched foot-
age of battles in Afghanistan, Chechnya,
and other jihadi conflict zones, and came
to think of the mujahideen in the vid-
eos as selfless heroes defending Islam
against corrupt crusaders. One day, they
watched a video of a beheading. Mem-
bers discussed where they'd like to fight
in the future, from Libya to Somalia to
the Seychelles. "You sit for months in a
group in which jihad is considered quite
normal," Jejoen said.
Jejoen continued to text girls, which
was forbidden by Belkacem; one day, he
ordered a brother to destroy Jejoen's SIM
card. Months later, Jejoen got in worse
trouble for proselytizing on his own.
Other Sharia4Belgium members said
that Jejoen was using the activity as an
excuse to meet girls. Belkacem accused
him of practicing "exorcism." He was
temporarily suspended from the group.
Belkacem dedicated the last four weeks
of the course to teaching the importance
of loyalty toward Muslims, and disavowal
of non-Muslims.The prospect of excom-
munication kept most members obedi-
ent; one brother, who was in his late teens,
was required to undergo circumcision.
The program's final task was a written
exam. The questions were rudimentary,
including "What does Islam mean?" and
"Should I vote?"(Members were discour-
aged from voting, on the ground that it
acknowledged the legitimacy of the dem-
ocratic process.) One student, whose exam
was found in the police raid, scored eighty-
four per cent. Today, he is believed to be
a member of the religious police in Raqqa.
By February, 2012, Belgian police were
wiretapping phone calls within the
group. But many of the trainees were
petty criminals familiar with police tac-
tics, and a former Belgian counterterror-
ism investigator told me, "They know
the way. They buy a cheap cell phone,
and they throw it away."
Belkacem never explicitly instructed
his followers to fight in Syria. But he
taught them that martyrdom on the bat-
tlefield, which he called "pure Islam,"
yielded the greatest reward in paradise.
"The battle is not only an invitation, but
an individual obligation," Walid Lak-
dim, a Sharia4Belgium member, said in
a police interrogation after returning
from Syria.
At the time, the Syrian revolution was